For the purpose of developing new therapeutic agents and new diagnostic agents, there have been demanded techniques to efficiently evaluate the responses of pharmaceutical candidate substances to cells. In these years, pharmaceutical candidate substances have been frequently synthesized by using combinatorial chemistry techniques, and a large number of types of compounds have been efficiently and systematically prepared. Candidate substances prepared in such ways are frequently small in quantity, accordingly the scale of the cell medium used for evaluation is also made to be of a microscopic size, and when a candidate substance is administered to cells, a microdroplet dispenser such as an inkjet printer is used as the case may be (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-033177). In other words, the observation apparatus is made to be of a microscopic size.
For the purpose of injecting medicinal solutions of a drug, a gene or the like into cells, generally adopted in a microinjection method in which a glass pipette with a very thinly tapered tip is pricked into a cell to introduce a medicinal solution like injection. Such a glass pipette is obtained by heating a glass tube with a burner or the like and by pulling the heated glass tube.
Additionally, possible examples of the candidate substances may include various substances such as common chemical substances, peptides, antibody derivatives and nucleic acids. These candidate substances include some substances that display effects only when incorporated into cells. Accordingly, various methods have been reported for the purpose of incorporating candidate substances into cells in medium. Examples of such methods include a method in which a portion of a cell membrane is made to be a semi-permeable membrane with streptolysin-O (SLO) to introduce substances into cells (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-129798).